Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal

“Mais animais” as they say around here – more animals.

Shortly after sending out last week’s despatch, Val Kilmer’s kittens started appearing – we counted them one by one with an increasing sense of fear and foreboding, but thankfully she stopped at a conservative five.

Not content with being a teenage mum it was also clear that there wasn’t just one father, but three or four. Imagine.

And so a small bundle of different coloured blind fur rats have been squealing at us all week from the safety of a crib under the daybed constructed from Simon’s old globetrotting kennel, and occasionally from the bathroom towel cupboard when Val breaches the defences and makes it into the house with a kitten in her mouth.

The dogs have taken a bit of battering as Val understandably wanted to keep prying pooch noses from getting too close, so I guess they’re giving her a wide berth while their cuts heal.

Garfie – at 65kg – went very quickly from licking his lips in interest to nervously dashing past and outside before the strangely fast moving thing with pins in its paws pounced.

The plan has always been for Val to be more of an outdoor cat once the kittens are old enough and so we’ve been containing them to our indoor/outdoor room much to her frustration.

But I was still surprised to be woken up at 5am by one of the kittens mewling loudly having found itself alone and hungry buried amid the towels under the sink.

We had a chat with Val about parenting.

We intend to keep two of the kittens and believe we have homes for the other three, but the issue of names has now been raised...

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Old-school pet names are definitely out of fashion, but human names are undoubtedly in.

Val Kilmer was an odd choice for a cat – it was Oda’s choice after her frustration with our decision to go with Garfunkel for the big dog – but it was her call, and it does open up interesting opportunities for Val’s progeny.

It strikes me as obvious that each of them now needs to be named after one of the characters played by Val Kilmer during his long acting career.

I mean who doesn’t want a cat called Jim Morrison, Iceman (either Admiral Ice or Lieutenant, depending on whether we want to go original Top Gun or remake) or “Bruce Wayne aka Batcat”?

I’ll be honest I had to turn to The Google to help me out with the rest.

I had no idea Val Kilmer had played Elvis Presley, Mark Twain, the Voice of God and Moses...twice.

And while we can’t call two kittens both Moses and “honey, can you hear the “Voice of God anywhere?” would be an unusual thing to shout down the valley, I’m sure we could train one to thrust over to his litter tray when we do an “uh-huh-huh” Elvis impression, and hopefully make it back alive.

But nothing will be decided until their eyes are open.

Please let us know which ones get your vote, or if there are any other hidden corners of Val Kilmer’s filmography that may have passed me by.

Lionel was back in the valley this week with his chainsaw and an ambitious project – cutting up the fallen 150 year old oak tree in a way which might allow us to turn it into something useful like a table, a bench or a bar...or ideally all three.

One of our two big and beautiful cork oaks fell when the fire got into its roots and smouldered away for a week.

It wouldn’t have burned if it had been healthy, so we approached the exercise expecting a rotten trunk, a load of firewood and a vague hope of recovering some useable sections.

Working quickly, the sad silhouette of a slumped, grand old tree was soon gone and the logs were tractored over to a spot on the hill for me to calculate the planking possibilities and get to work with an axe on the rest.

Constantly looking for new and exciting outdoor gym opportunities I ordered a book recommended by Dom last week and settled into some practical Scandinavian advice for wood chopping.

“Norwegian Wood” is an unusual subject for a best-seller (it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Scandinavia...and beyond), but to me it’s an extremely helpful and practical manual for wood stacking, chopping, chain sawing and storing.

And it’s always nice to have a pre-packaged, pocket-sized analogue rabbit hole to disappear down in a quiet moment.

Anyone who thinks chopping wood is as easy as it looks in the movies would no doubt be as frustrated as I was, buying an axe and then successfully chopping precisely nothing except a few small chips off an old block for all that effort.

And anyone who ordered the book on Amazon expecting Murakami’s weird novel of the same name might be marginally more confused than if they’d received what they were expecting.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Murakami but his parallel worlds through the walls of a well have become less fascinating since we discovered a deep well on the opposite hill.

We’ve moved on to Operation Hoover Dam this week in terms of outdoor projects to put new blisters on top of our olive grove-planting old blisters.

Ana and I took to the clay dam with medieval throwing spikes and shovels to prepare some holes for the fig trees, nespras (lowquat or Japanese plum), marmelos (quince) and a couple of soon to be acquired avocado trees.

All the bulldozing we did last year to create a new terrace was great, but the dam was mostly fortified with clay and so it takes a lot longer for things to seed.

It’s still somewhat bare despite our best efforts with a few sacks of oats – hence Daniel’s description of it as looking like the Hoover Dam from his house.

Not having an insanely hard-working volunteer like Dom here to encourage us to set a landscaping schedule means we’ve not been as motivated, and I really must prune the table grapes this week (before the full moon, apparently).

But Ana’s brother Erik is heading our way next week and is renowned for his excellently green fingers...so there’s hope.

The temperatures here certainly seem to be drifting up towards proper Spring, despite a short and surprising hail storm and we managed a couple of beach visits with our guest and friend Aislinn Laing, Hugo and their three boys from Madrid.

Aislinn is the bureau chief for Reuters for Spain and Portugal and so they set off on a cross-country road trip to reach us with a stop on the route each way to explore our wild coast.

We didn’t manage much more than a paddle, but I’m happy to report the birthday beach is as beautiful as ever, the meat from the local butcher is as good as always, and a wine taste off between a Spanish Tempranillo blend and Portuguese Aragonez (the same grape) leaned in Portugal’s favour (although it was close)!

If you’re interested in wine do sign up for The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure - I’ve just written a new story called Hard Graft on how America saved Europe’s wine and there’s more to come this week on three new and unusual grapes.

We start the week with a huge stack of new quotes from our builder to decipher, with huge congratulations to daughter Oda in LA on the occasion of her 27th birthday and to boyfriend Derek Day and Classless Act for making it to the pages of Forbes...and with an amazing new single.

Got to go...Val Kilmer’s making a rush for the door again. “NO! Leave the kittens there Val! We’ve talked about this…”

“So you’re retired?” someone asked me recently.

We’ve given up our jobs, moved to the countryside, don’t have any income but are spending lots of money building things, so I suppose we could give that impression.

My alternative answer to “no of course not” is: “yes, in the sense that we get tired, we recover, and then get tired again...or re-tired you might say.”

Often it’s a 5am start and a 10pm finish, juggling finances, planning interiors, editing podcast audio, studying for wine qualifications and Ana’s driving license, or fretting about whether we will succeed...none of which sounds like my idea of retirement.

In truth, we came here to launch our second careers – to move on from the nomadic years when Ana was a Swedish diplomat and I was a foreign correspondent and we lived all over the world a few years at a time.

There are parallels: the level of diplomacy required to get things done here should not be underestimated.

Maintaining the ability to communicate with an energy certificate engineer who still hasn’t delivered a vital document after first coming to survey the buildings last April...without screaming at him...is not straightforward.

And a lot of what we’re doing is – and will be – based around storytelling.

But at the core of it is throwing all our savings in with a whacking great loan courtesy of Portugal’s tourism authority to try and build a fancy guest lodge with a marvellous view.

Regular readers will have seen our scraggy patch of eucalyptus forest cut down and dug out, and watched our new buildings slowly rise from the roots.

We’ve been battling to stay on budget despite inflation, but at least so far appear to be on track and this week have been getting down into the nitty gritty of phase two.

Phase one was everything up to but not including the windows, and we agreed a fixed price for that eight months ago.

Phase two is everything else up to a finished villa, row of suites and main building with a pool, a little restaurant and the hope of knowing enough about Portuguese wine by next Spring to introduce guests to a taste of Alentejo.

So we’ve been hurling ourselves headlong into spreadsheets, checking what we planned for, what we’ve added since and what we’ve taken away and what we need to create the perfect spot.

The various orçamento quotes are all downloaded through Google Translate or DeepL to unveil what’s included in the price (and what’s not), and we’ve been digging down into the detail of how it’s all going to look.

Of course we’ve not done anything like this before – never built anything, especially in a remote part of rural Portugal, nor made so many expensive decisions on things we can only imagine.

We’ve lost track of all the site meetings, factory visits and supplier discussions we’ve had about the various solutions and are constantly thankful to our engineer José Correia for helping bridge the gap between us and our septuagenarian builder.

The research rumbles on, but decisions have to be made:

* Should the windows be wood, PVC or aluminium?

* Can we afford polished concrete floors throughout?

* Which heat pump is best for the underfloor heating?

* Do we go with the carpenter or IKEA for the kitchen cabinets?

* Do we install a solar pump or a regular pump for the new borehole?

* And where on earth do we buy 600m of three phase electrical cable?

Those are just today’s questions, and only the first one seems to have been answered so far: PVC windows seem best, given the intense 300 days of sun baking down on the south-facing buildings every year.

Everyone has an opinion, and they are usually different, but every bit of advice helps us move towards a decision which might be wrong, but at least we own it...and have thought about it.

The colourful do-to list of our post-it note wall remains – each one its own world of work and decision making.

But a few have already been removed and triumphantly scrunched into the fire and there has been some structural rearrangement.

And with the arrival of a new Cat (Catarina, a volunteer who spent a few days with us), we started to focus in on a few planting things.

As a trained agronomist, Cat helped us make some plans, scatter some land-improving oats and peg out an olive orchard for 42 trees.

The temperature has dropped down to just two or three degrees Celsius overnight, so we’re waiting before putting the saplings in, but the layout looks good and the irrigation plan should work...in case we don’t get much more rain this year.

The lake will take a metre or more before it overflows, so although we’re delighted with what we’ve got, we would still love a little more...in case there are any Rain Gods reading.

Sadly Cat couldn’t stay longer, but we will soon have more cats arriving in the form of Val Kilmer’s kittens...which should be due any day now.

Having a volunteer stay with us who knew so much about how to do stuff was brilliant and we are still in the market for anyone with experience in landscaping and building to give us a hand.

Right now we need some muscle as we’re going to be doing a lot of digging and rock moving to get those trees planted. Please apply here...and forward this to anyone you know who might be interested in helping us out before March.

Thank you for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal. This post is public so feel free to share it.

One of the differences between my old life and this new one is the lack of deadlines...I love a good deadline as it gives me that extra shove.

A dinner invitation and movie screening request from the local hunting club provided the incentive to prioritise a lower order post-it note and finally edit the video I filmed of their hunt.

I couldn’t believe it’s been almost a year since the Cow King took us to watch the ancient montaria style of hunting with dogs driving wild boar (wild boar) out of the undergrowth and into the sights of waiting associação de caça (hunting club) members.

You can read about that adventure here, but you can also watch the video...although if you’re not a fan of wild boar (wild boar) butchery, maybe give it a miss?

And thanks to another deadline I also did a turn on the ABC Australia radio show Late Night Live with the legendary broadcaster Phillip Adams.

The subject was all things cork and so I had to be up nice and early (Portugal time) to make sure I got my facts right.

It was my 51st birthday this week, and once again my wonderful wife nailed it with a surprise trip to Sagres and a picnic on the southwestern tip of mainland Europe at Cabo de San Vincente (Cape St Vincent) – the edge of the world – while Cat looked after the dogs.

Amazing sandwiches for lunch, a great beer on Sagres beach with our friends Richard & Pauline and dinner at an American/Mexican taco restaurant after a champagne sunset made for a wonderful day and stay in a clifftop pousada.

Ana introduced the idea of a “Birthday Boxing Day” and so we slowly meandered our way back up the coast stopping for Sunday lunch at one of our favourites: O Sacas.

We had a lovely weekend off...I guess that’s the kind of thing one does more often when one is retired (and not just tired, again).

But while everything we’re doing is tough and challenging and we juggle the post-it notes in a new order of importance, we must remember to remind ourselves how fun and adventurous it is to be working on our crazy project...in this beautiful part of the world.

This year we decided to spend the ‘New Year, New Start’ gym membership money on post-it notes.

The white board just wasn’t big enough for what we aimed to achieve on January 3rd when we felt compelled to get a grip on the chaos of our projects our business and our lives in general.

Inspired by Ana’s experience of work planning retreats she led our inaugural annual planning meeting with the support of the sticky paper colours yellow, pink, green and blue.

And in the pursuit of strict structure and prioritisation we almost ran out of yellow.

Everything was on the table...and then stuck on the windows...and then transferred into a spreadsheet as we divvied it all up and got a head start on 2023.

Things have been...getting away from us...and after putting back on all the weight I’d lost last year with my Springtime strimming frenzy, we had everything from pulling up estevas (rock rose) and moving rocks to getting Ana’s driving license and designing interiors.

This is the year of action, after all.

Last year we took a different approach, rejecting the whole wholesome approach and doubling down when we #TookBackJanuary with Mr Piggywig’s parade, and that was fun.

But with an F-ing dishwasher problem still to solve, a pump to buy for our disappointing and expensive new hole, and measuring how many hundred metres of three phase, armoured electrical cable we need (and where we can buy it cheap), there’s no time for pig roasting.

In my first step towards a clean-living, booze-light January I made sure the rest of the Christmas cake was eaten as soon as possible and all the chocolates polished off so I could start cutting back without any distractions.

Bread is out, intermittent fasting and aggressive dog walking is in.

We need to be in tip-top shape for the largest expansion of the valley family so far: it turns out Val Kilmer is pregnant.

For those a blogpost or two behind and confused by this unexpected and unique Hollywood update, Val Kilmer is the Oda-named cat we rescued from a restaurant clifftop, and the vet says we’ve got less than two weeks before anything from two to six kittens are delivered.

No wonder she’s been hungry.

Valkyrie Killmouse (to give her full name) has now successfully imposed herself on Simon & Garfunkel and is turning into a wonderfully sweet indoor/outdoor household cat..let’s see how she does as a teenage mum as she can’t be more than a year old.

The post-it notes naturally arranged themselves into sections like ‘building project’, landscaping, guesthouse improvements...that kind of thing...and then were ordered by Quarter (1-4) and Priority (1-3).

Top of the list, beyond the usual post-holiday catch-up admin, was planting trees to make use of the continuing and very welcome rain and getting Ana’s driving license sorted.

Now that has been a drama: one small yellow post-it note just doesn’t seem enough for the weight of the task in hand.

Ana’s had a driving license for ten years and other than needing a few lessons in non-automatic cars (courtesy of learning to drive in LA) is good to go.

Although her US license expired a while back, her Kenyan license and international permit from our last posting meant we didn’t foresee any problem.

But...it seems Kenya didn’t sign the right UN treaty in the 1960s (I don’t know, maybe they were too busy getting independence or something) and so Portugal still doesn’t recognise a Kenyan licence and so the best option is to take a new test here. How hard could it be?

It turns out 28 theory classes and 32 driving lessons are obligatory preparation for a test – even for those who can already drive – and although the package costs less than in most other European countries, that’s a lot of time and effort.

And Portugal’s highway code book is a monstrous document of amateur psychology, sweeping generalisations about how much “more aggressive” male drivers are than women, and a lot of ambiguity.

Ana’s been caning it on the studies and we’ll be taking Siouxsie the Suzuki out for some clutch practice, so hopefully we’ll soon be up in Lisbon for some proper practical lessons and a shorter waiting list for a test than down here in the country.

Under “Outdoor Projects” Q1, priority 1 was “order trees for Spring” and “seed terrace” and so we began the search for a source.

A great Facebook group tip-off pointed us towards a plant nursery up in Monchique called Viveiros Dinis and so we headed for the hills with our neighbour Daniel who’s always on the lookout for new plants.

Linking up with Swiss pals Niels and the particularly green-fingered Sybille, we ticked off the vegetables before moving on to a meat main course at Dona Paula’s wild boar (wild boar) restaurant and dropped by a fabulously crazy sculpture garden for dessert.

We learned a lot about the different types of local olives (the best for eating, the best for making oil), were told we needed permission to plant cork oak and pine nuts from the town hall, and were kept well away from citrus saplings curiously sealed off in double plastic tunnels.

It turns out there’s a major threat to Iberian citrus trees, which if established could wipe out Portugal and Spain’s orchards in just 15 years...that’s a lot of lost oranges.

This week’s rabbit hole is Huanglongbing disease (HLB) – also known as ‘Citrus Greening’ and caused by Candidatus liberibacter – a bacterium spread by insects.

The guilty sap-sucking psyllid is a little blighter called Trioza erytreae and it’s been spreading down the Portuguese coast for the last ten years.

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

We’re lucky the Citrus Greening bacteria hasn’t followed it yet, but the Life for Citrus programme fears it’s only a matter of time.

“The disease has no known cure and the current means of control...[has] a high economic and environmental cost that is incompatible with European production systems,” the EU-funded body warns.

Presumably meaning you have to rip them all out and it explains why some fields of oranges near the coast from here have gone un-harvested and we heard are destined for destruction.

Daniel went plant-crazy as usual, Niels & Sybille chose four types of apricot tree and we picked up a few fast-growing melaleuca to help private-ise our guesthouse while we plot, scheme, order and return with the trailer this week or next to get planting!

I’d love to linger longer and bore you with the minutes of our latest building meeting, and the findings of our PVC factory day out, but there’s post-it notes to tear through, tick off, scrunch up and use to start the fire.

But I definitely think we’re going to need a lot more yellow ones.

On New Year’s Eve 2022, the last despatch of the year looks back at the challenges we’ve faced in a tough but fun year, and what we hope to achieve in 2023.

Thanks for listening - and for following the blog and/or the podcast - please share it with a few friends to help broaden our support community that’s helping us through our big new adventure.

Audio versions of next year’s despatches will all appear on the podcast feed, but do check out the pictures and the links on the website!

Don’t forget to check out the wine blog as well…there’s already a load of tales from the winelands of Alentejo, and a lot more in my notebook and audio recorder ready to burst into action in 2023!

Finally digging for water in December 2022 - and getting a lot more from the sky than the ground (and a lot more cheaply)…but them’s the breaks.

TRANSCRIPT…

It was months ago when Twitching Justino’s divining rods first dipped towards the ground and two crossed sticks X-marked the spot where he literally felt we would have the best hope of finding water.

As I wrote in August: “the only control you have over a high-stakes gamble is which good luck charm to choose,” and we’d chosen him for a job which would cost thousands of euros.

After weeks of delays and of broken machinery, Justino’s rig finally rocked up in the valley with three boreholes to dig: one for our friend David, one for neighbour Daniel and one for us.

It was proper pioneer wild-west stuff, and his guys weren’t messing around.

The rumble of the massive diesel generator clocked them in each morning and the sudden silence checked them out each night, as the diamond-tipped drill bit gradually cut its way through our land three metres at a time.

That was the length of each drill section pulled from the truck and hauled vertical when the time was right and then added to the ever deepening hole.

Each time the drilling paused, a soil sample was taken and laid out in order to build up a profile of our geology.

We would occasionally wander up to watch, willing water up to the surface, but then leave a little disappointed that it hadn’t already started spouting H2O like an oil strike in a movie.

There was nothing to do but wait and hope that somewhere down there – between 150 and 250m – there’d be something worth digging for at €50 a metre.

The borehole investment is about future-proofing our tourism project for the decades to come, and as you’ll know we were becoming increasingly worried about water throughout the long dry summer.

But December’s rainfall has been breaking records – not just in Lisbon – and has returned in a volume not seen for 40 years.

Last year we were enjoying the beach and the sunshine at this time, but then we suffered with a shamefully low lake come the Spring.

But now the lake is already higher than we have ever seen it. Increasing the capacity and cutting swales in the hillside to extend its catchment area all seems to have worked (thanks Carlos!).

There’s been enough rain to soak the ground, so all the excess now freely flows into the dam with waterfalls forming and even a spring which trickles for days after a downpour.

But it’s muito complicado according to Senhor Manuel our builder, whose guys have been kept away by the weather: tiling one roof and finishing the form wood on the other between storms ahead of a concrete truck which can’t deliver because it’s still too wet.

Work is finished now for the holidays, and while we wish for more rain we also don’t want the work to fall too far behind schedule.

But we have a little work on our hands introducing the latest addition to the family – an abandoned young cat who we’ve adopted to help with our mouse issue.

It wasn’t a mouse problem as such – we have an indoor/outdoor room and it was a little awkward catching the guy that had somehow made it into our bedroom in the middle of the night, and given the lack of mousetraps here a cat seems a good solution.

I would have thought an old-school snapping trap would have been a humane option but none of the shops here sell them, leaving only poisons and something I’d never previously encountered: rat glue.

This terrible stuff seems much more like torture – sticking them to a bit of cardboard to die slowly if they’re not quickly dealt with on capture...we don’t want to be doing that.

Hence the idea of getting a cat – a kitten probably, given that Simon & Garfunkel would be more likely to accept a small furry ball than a clawing, hissing, growling cat.

But this wasn’t to be: it’s not kitten season for a couple of months, and while visiting one of our favourite clifftop restaurants to ask about their beautiful cats (to line ourselves up for a future kitten) they reported an abandoned youngster who wasn’t getting on with the locals.

Next thing we had a cat in the car and were buying a litter box – she’s probably only nine months old but friendly and used to people...and it was Oda’s turn to name her.

Having scoffed at our decision (without consultation) to call the big dog Garfunkel, Oda promptly settled on “Val Kilmer” – not our immediate first choice.

But having thought it through, we decided “Valkyrie Kill-Mouse” was an acceptable option, given it could be suitably abbreviated.

Simon picked up a nose battering on day one and is currently trying to reimpose some kind of control (good luck with that)...and Garfie is showing perhaps a little too much interest.

Let’s see how things go over Christmas...

Back to the borehole digging and Justino and the gang cut through schists until they hit bedrock at 205m – deeper than we expected – and sadly they didn’t find the magic underground reservoir we’d been dreaming about.

He estimates it will provide about 5,000 litres a day...not a huge amount, but along with our other water sources plenty for the 20 or so people we’d expect at full capacity when the lodge is open.

But we still have to install an underground pump, get power down to it and buy pipes to transport the new water to the current tanks...and until we do that we won’t have the chance to test the water quality.

Drinking water would be amazing, mineral-salt water like our current supply would be second best, but the worst of all worlds would be water that’s heavy in iron...that would require two different filtration systems that don’t come cheap.

It was disappointing – it’s a big chunk of change for not a huge return – but we always knew it would be a gamble...and we chose our lucky charm.

Daniel got a little less than us, David got a little more, but this is a dry area and we should be glad for what we have…and long may it keep on flowing.

It’s good to be at home and together over the holidays after Ana’s dad sadly passed away a week ago aged only 75.

We are proudly remembering José Manuel Valadas Revez, a man who had a huge impact during his lifetime.

He was a revolutionary student leader opposing Salazar in Portugal in the late 1960s and early 70s, and considered such a threat by the dictatorship regime that he had to flee and continue his operations with fellow courageous revolutionaries under political asylum in Sweden.

After the carnation revolution in 1974 he returned to Portugal, and worked as a civil servant in many capacities, greatly contributing to the rise of the new nation and notably its education system.

He held a special place in his heart for East Timor where he lived and worked for many years.

Zé was a beloved husband, father, brother and grandfather. He was also a popular friend and colleague. He is greatly missed.

Rest in Peace Zé. Our thoughts are with Filomena and Ana’s sisters Rita and Maria João and his sister Ana-Maria.

Visiting a festival devoted to a surprising vegetable, but a lesson in just what our region is famous for from November 2022.

TRANSCRIPT…

Different people value many different things very differently, and it turns out one of those things in this part of the world is the sweet potato.

The humble batata-doce, as it’s known in Portuguese, enjoys a cult status worthy of celebration, police checkpoints and a lot of music.

I’ll admit I chuckled (and may even have mocked) the first time I saw signs advertising the annual Sweet Potato Festival in Aljezur – a lovely little town half an hour south of us over the border in the Algarve.

But it turns out there’s more to this place than the last Moorish castle to fall to the Crusaders in 1249, the amazing beaches and the weird story of its disappearing river...but more of that later.

I jokingly pondered just how much fun a sweet potato festival could possibly be, but then found myself driving south with an open mind and a stomach making the rumblies that only batatas-doces could satisfy.

The things you do when your wife has gone to Sweden for two weeks and even the dogs are getting bored of the conversation.

To be fair, I have been making a lot of progress with my podcast editing, and we would probably have gone to check out the festival together anyway.

There were policemen on every corner directing traffic away from the already heaving showgrounds – and it was only 3pm.

Just like our big fair in São Teotónio in the heat of summer, a line of tractors of various sizes and price-tags lined the entrance to the giant marquee: this was, not surprisingly, going to be heavy on agriculture.

There was much hubbub inside: a magician was on stage entertaining the kids and I headed straight for the “eating potatoes” section, rather than the “learning about potatoes” area,  or the “have your tried our peanuts” zone.

I had no idea what to ask for, or at least how they are served and what you eat them with and panicked, pointed at someone else’s table and waited for a beer and a dose of doces to be delivered.

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

✓

Apparently Aljezur provides the perfect growing conditions for the lyra variety of sweet potato, which according to some people who know things about food, has “a white pulp that turns yellow when cooked, a skin ranging from orange to purple, and a very sweet taste.”

“Being very firm and with less moisture, Lyra is a variety that can be stored for longer periods and holds shape after being cooked,” it goes on.

I’ve always liked a sweet potato – particularly the orange ones – I’d say my favourite meal growing up was dad’s breaded chicken breast, sweetcorn and sweet potato.

They are extremely good for you.

“An excellent source of beta carotene, vitamin C, and potassium,” it seems, while also rich in fibre and with a relatively low glycemic index, whatever that is when it’s at home.

And Lyra – if I can call her that – is apparently unique to this stretch of Portugal’s Atlantic coast from Aljezur up to Vila Nova de Milfontes with an EU classification of Protected Geographical Indication – a bit like you get with wine, champagne and pre-Brexit Cornish pasties.

So it’s not just Aljezur that should be celebrating – we all should, and we should all get some of the little blighters into the soil in the Spring so we can have our own sweet spud festival in the Valley next November.

This explains the great excitement the other week when Carlos the Landscaper presented us, with a grin, two giant specimens he had liberated from his father’s field.

“Leave them for a week or two until they get really sweet,” he winked. It’ll have to wait another week now until Ana gets back, but apparently they need some time out of the fridge to reach perfection.

My plate of sauce-less fried sweet potato discs arrived, looking nothing like the one on the other table I’d pointed at, but damn they were good with some recommended mustard and mayonnaise.

I picked up on a hint of chestnut – once the staple food here in Portugal and also celebrated this time of year.

The myth in Aljezur is the Knights of Santiago were fuelled by sweet potatoes when they overran the castle on the hill in 1249 after centuries of Moorish rule.

But given that these well-travelled tubers originated in South America, and it was the 1500s before Portugal’s explorers returned from there, it fails the test of timeline.

Aljezur is Arabic for island...and it’s not...but the local museum dates the end of its time as a major coastal port and the retreating of the river to the 1755 earthquake which was caused by an undersea fault.

Destruction by the earthquake and tsunami led to the building of the Igreja Nova (New Church) neighbourhood of town where the festival site sits.

Rumblies sated, I was energised to wander the many stalls selling everything from woven baskets to essential oils, from soap stands to nut counters, and of course the vast sweet potato presentation table.

I considered the 5kg bag of giants, but settled on 2kgs of the smaller ones, and then discovered there was so much more you could do with a sweet potato.

I’ve tried one of the two melhores bolos (best cakes) the woman behind the counter couldn’t decide which to recommend the most…and sold me both.

I’ll have the slice of cheese and sweet potato cake for dessert today I think.

I didn’t find any batata-doce booze, but then there is a lot of fiery medronho around here which does that job rather well (and the strawberry tree fruit isn’t really used for anything else).

It is a thing apparently – there’s a place up the coast which makes sweet potato vodka and Japaneses shōchū (as opposed to sake) which often uses batatas-doces. One for our friend Niels to try next perhaps?

I left before the music started and before the sun had set, but with a new-found knowledge and respect for sweet potatoes and a terrible guilt that I ever questioned their festival credentials.

My only regret is missing this year’s peanut festival in nearby Rogil – celebrating the amendoim harvest at the end of October (not to be confused with the amendoa harvest of almonds) – now that would have been nuts.

Having survived the fire, the equipment for our huge new solar power system needed a bit of final tweaking in October 2022 before the giant metaphorical Frankenstein switch could be thrown and the control room could start throbbing with energy.

TRANSCRIPT…

While energy costs continue to spiral, those of us living off the grid are allowing ourselves a brief self-congratulatory moment in the sun.

In our part of Portugal we have 300 days of sunshine a year to not only enjoy wonderful beach days and sunsets (or fight the occasional fire), but also to generate a free and endless supply of our own power and hot water.

It’s not free power of course – the up-front installation costs of a big system are eye-wateringly high, especially with a madcap new tourism lodge-building project and no power line nearby.

Fortunately, and with good advice, we ordered early when there was stock and the prices weren’t as high, and this week I am writing in celebration of the installation.

And in celebration of how our entire new uninsured system wasn’t torched when the fire licked a few flames inside our solar house but somehow didn’t set the cardboard boxes of lithium batteries alight.

And also in celebration of Sergio...the solar power engineer who “is a machine when he puts his mind to it, and works like three men” in the words of his boss Iain.

That’s right: a man who installs power systems in short bursts of high activity...and who is called Sergio.

When we arrived here in the Valley of the Stars a little over two years ago there was power and there was water...we just didn’t quite know how that magic happened.

A small patch of hillside between our house and the lake was adorned with an elaborately built concrete shrine to the ancient 24 solar panels it enclosed and protected.

Carefully laid and rendered bricks created a steep staircase cut into the hill on either side, with flower beds at the bottom and a retaining wall and safety rail at the top to protect what was then the latest late-1990s technology from falling stones and careless strimming.

The little building alongside immediately became known as the “solar house” as it was filled with whirring machines, spinning meters, gurgling battery cells and a line of distilled water bottles: foot soldiers on hand to keep the lead-acid monster alive.

The cells needed constant care and monitoring and regular topping up to keep the battery functioning.

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to keep up to date and please share the blog with friends.

✓

Our solar system, of which we are just a small part, was vast and ancient (at least 20 years old) – two panels were cracked, but a few upgrades had kept it going.

There was no instruction manual, Google would have been brilliant if we’d had internet (which at the time was rare, except on top of the hill...something of which we were recently reminded after the fire melted our internet dish), and these were less like batteries and more like pets or tamagotchi.

* If you don’t feed them (distilled water) they get grumpier and a lot more gurgley and you realise that unless you do something they will eventually die

* There might be warning signs but they’re hard to interpret and they don’t say anything when you ask them what they want (the specific gravity hydrometer was a little advanced for me at that stage)

* They go into these mad hours of crazy energy use with no indication of where all the power is going, and working them too hard wears them out and eventually kills them

And so I called some people.

A couple of local German solar experts dropped by, did the equivalent of a long mechanic’s inhalation (“it’s gonna cost you”) and told us to rip the whole thing out and start again.

Then ex-pat Brit Iain Garner came up from the Algarve and with a laid-back surfer’s sigh and a couple of pokes said: “well, they work, don’t they? Might last another three years, might not, but if it ain’t broke...”

We went with Iain, and when it did break we asked him to replace the batteries.

It turned out the mad hours of energy use was caused by a leaking toilet cistern and an old water pump which constantly ran and destroyed the battery – like many things here I understood the problem just too late.

Each of the 12 cells weighed 150kg and Iain and I commented on how heavy they looked as we had coffee and cake and watched his young workers hauling them into the van.

All four new lithium batteries fitted into a little box which looked like a small computer server.

The amount of stress and attention-time spent on keeping the lights on dropped dramatically as lithium batteries look after themselves.

I now use the distilled water for Siouxsie the Suzuki’s radiator.

Three hundred days a year of sunshine is a lot of sunshine, but 65 days without is not insignificant.

And so the next step was upgrading the concrete shrine: replacing the old 24 with a dozen more powerful and sleek new panels with the uncanny ability to work in cloud...on those other 65 days.

Our generator use plummeted, and that’s when we bought a dishwasher.

We hadn’t run the washing machine and the dishwasher at once, we planned toaster use and ironing and did sometimes trip the system with the high pressure power washer, but while life has been gradually changing, it’s now taken a huge leap into the 21st century.

Of course there was only one person to turn to when we started planning for more houses, more guests and greater power requirements.

The order was made in January, the panels and inverters were delivered a few months ago, and after a few weeks of activity, Iain and his team dug holes, cut and built an aluminium structure, mounted the panels and wired the whole thing up.

A three-phase 48V system, with 72 new panels, 20 batteries and a completely new infrastructure of inverters and controllers isn’t cheap, but it’s a thing of beauty...and at the current gas prices it will pay for itself a lot more quickly.

Thanks to Sergio’s Saturday surge and a long power-day in the solar house, it has now been renamed “The Control Room” with a wonderfully organised network of cables, battery boxes and a lot of copper.

After a few teething troubles with the batteries – and after a visit from the manufacturers – Iain pulled the giant metaphorical Frankenstein switch and the control room started throbbing with energy.

While I’m still trying to remain well grounded, it’s going extremely well so far.

A single phase generator doesn’t work with a three-phase system, but the vast battery bank is full before lunch, so maybe we don’t need one?

We can now bake in the evenings, wash clothes and crockery while ironing and making toast...and maybe I can finally dust off my hairdryer.

At this rate we’ll be able to install electric water heaters as backup, put electric ovens in the new buildings and think about getting an electric car. Imagine.

The aftermath of the big fire, tackling some small spot fires a week later, losing one of our oldest oak trees, and trying to work out a master-plan by turning disaster to our advantage from October 2022.

TRANSCRIPT…

A full week after fire hit the valley I asked Ana what she would least expect to see on the same hillside where it started.

“Another fire,” she replied, and she was right!

Our eyes are now highly tuned to the slightest puff of smoke on the horizon and this was the first of a handful of fires which had been smouldering out of sight for days in tree trunks and undergrowth before a strong north-west wind blew them into life.

Just as our nerves were beginning to calm they gave us the jitters again, but anything too big or dangerous was immediately leaped upon by a still-vigilant Bombeiros fire crew.

But then on Monday morning smoke appeared on our hill opposite the house.

We traipsed for ten minutes all the way down one side of the valley and right up the other carrying buckets of water – trying not to spill too much as we negotiated the blackened but still annoyingly persistent silvesbrambles that tugged and scratched at our legs.

The two great cork oaks on our land are certainly more than a hundred years old and we had been worried about one which seemed to be struggling through the drought.

But when we reached the source of the smoke it turned out to be the healthy oak – and sadly it had already fallen – the fire having got into its trunk and roots and was slowly burning this grand old tree into charcoal.

✓

It took two rounds of water buckets and a lot of soil shovelling to dampen down the fire which had carved out a cave a metre deep beneath the base of the tree.

It was very sad to see our most beautiful sobreiro cork oak collapsed back onto the hillside.

That’s when Ana said “let’s make it into something.”

What better way to honour its long service than by turning it into perhaps a table or some other kind of furniture?

Logistically it won’t be the easiest of jobs, with a trunk more than a meter in diameter to cut and transport, but it’s a great thought and hopefully we will make it happen.

This week has been all about looking at the positives around the fire: the opportunities it has provided for us to shape and frame our valley for the decades to come.

And at this point I must thank everyone who has so kindly and generously contributed to our Help Reforest the Valley of the Stars GoFundMe page.

We were totally overwhelmed by the donations you sent us and we are now in the process of working out exactly which trees we are going to plant where and getting a big order in for the Spring.

If you haven’t received a personal message from us yet, it’s coming, and we will make sure you know what your money has been spent on so you can come and see your tree, orchard or hillside in the years ahead!

The fire cleared all the brush from our wild, north-facing slope and revealed every contour and terrace, giving us access to parts of the valley which had been largely unexplored.

We’ve been taking advice from various friends as to what kind of earth moving to do while we have this once in a lifetime opportunity of starting from scratch.

One suggestion was to cut many terraces to retain water and nutrients from the ash, or to use the spinning chains attachment behind a track-laying vehicle to mulch everything down ahead of replanting – we’re exploring all options and have a couple of guys with machines on standby.

The bottom of the valley is a relatively flat and wide, highly fertile, water-rich field which will be perfect for farming vegetables.

The dam which creates our lake needs to be shored up with earth, as the overgrown, tightly packed and thirsty canas reeds may have been much-hated, but provided stability on the hillside.

Perhaps we could cut a terrace or two across that slope to give a sheltered spot which a small orchard, or handful of avocado trees might like?

For a long time we have been pondering what kind of farm vehicle we need to help us tend to the grape vines, to move logs around, to mulch branches and to plough fields.

If we can get one second hand tractor to do all that we’ll be in great shape, and so the research has begun.

But our old friend Wade Graham, who flew in from Los Angeles to visit, is leaning heavily on the “animals over machinery” school of rural management.

Among the many hats Wade wears, he is a landscape architect to some of the great Californian gardens, and had already booked his trip before the fire presented him with a blank canvas and good intel on how fires spread here.

The plan is apparently not to prevent fire as you might expect, but “to shape the landscape to welcome it in a low-intensity and non-destructive way,” Wade told us.

“It’s an inhabitant of the system – it lives here – the idea is to welcome good fire rather than keeping it out so long that when it comes it’s bad fire.”

We’ve been walking the land over the last few days talking about our ideas and our ambitions for the property while he ponders, asks questions and slowly develops a plan.

He’s the author of books such as American Eden, and has a new book project on fire and land use, so hopefully we can help him learn more about our montado system from our friends who are living it.

Wade dismissed the deck idea I’ve been plotting for more than a year by making us chop down bushes, prune trees and extract a terrible barbeque to create a wonderfully shaded viewing and seating spot without the need for an expensive new wooden fire risk.

He questioned the proposed location of our vineyard having seen a line of water-dependent grasses and reminding us that vines don’t like wet feet.

We’re now re-thinking where the vineyard will be and need to dig some deep trenches to expose the terroir and ask for some help from the expert grape-growers we’ve met to decide the best place to plant which Portuguese grapes.

Wade’s thinking is developing into a sectioning of the land into zones to be managed separately with the ones closer to the house and the new buildings being prioritised.

We’re due to catch up with a woman who rents goats to see how her land clearance system works and whether bringing some aggressive grazers in for a few weeks a year is better than having our own living, breathing lawnmowers to take the strain out of the strimming year-round.

We think the hill above our house is the best place for an olive grove, there are lots of thoughts about Cyprus trees, living fences and adding to the oak and cork tree forests on the opposite hill, but it’s very much a work in progress.

Thank you for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Ana and I finally managed to visit the Portocarro vineyard this week – north of us up the Alentejo coast – to meet owner and winemaker Pepe Mota Capitão.

We had a great tour, talked a lot about natural wine and the generational gap with his daughter Teresa, an oenologist in the making, and tried some lovely wines, but it was on the way back when we got a phone call.

“What’s going on in your valley?” our neighbour David asked with concern in his voice.

We had no idea...but the new WhatsApp group “Guardians of the Valley” came into its own.

It turns out a bigger fire had burst out of the undergrowth close to our house, but the brigade’s helicopter was on it...scooping water out of our neighbour Daniel’s lake and soaking the flames into submission.

It’s apparently very common to have small after-fires when a big old blaze comes through.

This week w…

A scary day in September 2022 as the wind changed, a fire started a few miles away and we had to pack up everything we didn’t want to lose and headed for the hills in the hope there’d be a home to return to…

TRANSCRIPT…

If you saw a fire heading your way and had less than an hour to bundle together all the worldly possessions you wanted to keep – the ones that could fit in the car alongside one small dog and one very large dog – what would you take?

And what would you leave to burn?

Some choices were simple, some a little superfluous these days, but everything came for a good reason...and some things got left behind in the rush.

As we left our valley just as the wildfire was arriving, the eerily realistic poodle mask had somehow made it to the back seat and a large blue papier-mâché unicorn was on Ana’s knee next to a large green octopus mug.

Simon was snarling at Garfunkel who is not used to being jammed into a car full of folders and bags and other unsettling things.

It was a situation we hadn’t spent a lot of time worrying about or planning for, because it would take an extraordinary series of events for a fire to reach our valley.

On Sunday all those events coincided and we packed up – documents, emotional attachments and expensive stuff first – and after waiting as long as we could, drove out through burning eucalyptus trees just before the fire cut off the road.

We stood on a nearby hill to watch the unstoppable, then moved one hilltop further away as the hot east wind whipped up the flames and spread the fire into a tinderbox of undergrowth in our neighbouring valley.

Everything had changed at two minutes past midday on a quiet Sunday when our friend and neighbour David called to raise the alarm about a fire a couple of kilometres away.

We have only a handful of days a year when the wind is from the east.

Our normal, wonderful air-conditioning northwest wind from the ocean had switched to the hot wind from the Spanish interior which sometimes brings Saharan sand to turn the sky an eerie red.

You’ll perhaps remember the words of our wise old builder from a blog a couple of months ago: “De Espanha, nem bom vento, nem bom casamento,” meaning: “From Spain (comes) neither good wind nor good marriage.”

This was not a day of good wind. The fire was burning fiercely, was spreading fast and the wind was blowing towards us.

I jumped in the car to check on friends living near the fire and to see it up close.

All hands were up on the hill with water and beaters, firefighters were being dropped off by helicopter and the first airdrops of water were dowsing down.

I saw the fire increasingly getting out of control, Ana messaged to say the fire was spreading towards us and so I raced back, went into crisis mode and we started to pack.

First we grabbed all our legal documents and passports, then expensive electronics and hard drives went into one suitcase with the family photo frames. They’re all in the cloud of course, but grabbing physical frames seemed the right thing to do.

We chose memories and connections from our various lives in various places, we took sheep skins given by Ana’s mum, Maasai blankets, a Springbok rug and then piled in clothes and stuff for potentially weeks away.

Everything was in for a reason: Mr Poodlehead represents the fun we have had with friends in this new place, the blue Burmese unicorn was named Arnošt Duček by a teenage Oda in Bangkok.

Oda had bought the daily-used octopus tea mug, her school books were packed as was the ugly Toby Jug darts trophy which is a memory of my mum’s funeral.

After my parents died I moved the family history here – all the photos and old passports and memorabilia were piled in boxes. I didn’t take those. Should I have? Where would I start?

Ana chose a selection of her shoes – extravagant and practical (but mostly extravagant) – those our daughter Oda had bought and others with memories of Thailand, LA and Kenya. Oda’s drawings and little notebooks from school in Thailand and LA were also packed.

We have never been more thankful for Cassie the Hilux: a big, reliable car with space in the back and the ability to go off road and get us out of trouble.

Sadly Siouxsie the Suzuki would have to stay behind.

In a moment of genius Ana grabbed our two Kenyan leather folding safari chairs and threw them in the back as we closed up.

Once the car was facing out and ready to leave we waited as long as we could.

The fire accelerated up the next valley and flames began licking the edge of our land.

I raced around desperately trying to pump water from the lake onto the house and to soak the land, but the water level had dropped beow the pipe and there was no time to prime the pump.

Gonçalo, the son of O Rei das Vacas (the Cow King, António Oliveira) appeared with a tractor and a plough and immediately set to work cutting a fire break in front of the house – we believe that’s what made the difference and we are forever grateful.

Then the fire jumped across into our lower valley and started burning through the eucalyptus trees straight up Vale das Estrelas.

We dived quickly into neighbour Daniel’s house to grab his important documents and headed for the next hills just before the fire blocked our way.

As we stood at a distance and watched the flames tear across Daniel’s land, we were convinced his house had gone – I heard an explosion and thought it was the gas bottle by the house.

The wind switched from east to south and back to east again, and with each move it raised hopes and dashed hopes.

Through the smoke we tried to make out where the fire had reached, but perspective was playing tricks on us.

We couldn’t see into our valley – only to the top of the hill – and to the guesthouse which appeared to be still standing.

My annoyingly calm war correspondent approach of: “it’s going to be fine, love” was understandably answered by an expletive barrage of just how not fine any of this was.

The trees lining our road hadn’t burned, but then a huge plume of black smoke erupted from the valley below.

The firefighting aircraft started water-dropping runs over the house, helicopters with huge buckets beneath were doing laps back and forth from a nearby lake.

We knew then the fire had reached the house and that everything was probably lost.

That’s when the narrative changed to: “whatever happens we’ll be OK, we’re fine, the dogs are fine, we have each other, we’ll get through this (it’s you and me, baby).”

All our plans, our investment, our dreams, our new life of finally having a place to call home after decades on the road, was at the mercy of where embers might fall, where fire might find its way.

There were tears. We didn’t know whether to stand and watch everything burn, or to go somewhere else.

Our wonderful friends and neighbours Ola & Merete had already made a bed up for us for the night and invited us over.

But we also had old friends from our Bangkok days arriving to stay with us – they were just arriving in our area when we suggested they head on to lunch without us.

We left our vantage point and went to meet them – it was their holiday, they’d come out of their way to see us, and so we took them to a little beach bar to talk about other things and get a little respite.

As we arrived, not knowing if we would have a home to go back to, our phones started to ping with photos from our friend and landscaper Carlos Dias who’d reached Vale das Estreles with the brigade.

Our house was fine. Our guesthouse was fine. The whole new building site was untouched.

The feeling of relief was immense. After watching the sun go down over the ocean we drove back through a charred eucalyptus forest, the darkness illuminating glowing spot fires all over the place.

The power was off, so we lit candles, put on some music, opened a b…

With drought continuing to affect the valley and our concerns rising about having enough water for our tourism project, in August 2022 we enlisted the help of some water diviners to help us dig a borehole in the best possible spot.

You can hear what happened in S2:Ep11 - Digging Deep which is on this feed.

TRANSCRIPT…

Drought is on many people’s minds at the moment, but hosepipe bans are the least of our worries living off the grid in remote rural Portugal, where there’s no water company to call if the taps run dry.

We conserve water obsessively and are still drinking rainwater from the April showers, but we need to think a bit bigger and secure ourselves a reliable supply.

The water we inherited contains a lot of minerals and so there’s nothing we’d love more right now than an endless supply of clean water bursting out of the ground backlit and cascading in slow motion.

Wells run dry, but boreholes have greater longevity – it’s just they don’t come cheap.

And digging a successful borehole appears to be like rolling a dice or spinning a roulette wheel, where the only control you have over a high-stakes gamble is which good luck charm to choose.

Finding underground water should be a science, but apparently it’s more of an art – and there are a lot of people out there who think their way is the only way, and that anyone else is either a conman or a charlatan.

But there is one thing most can agree on: everyone in the water divining business is a little...odd.

We have been talking to borehole experts since we arrived here two years ago – trying to find the right person with the best information to dig a very deep but quite expensive hole for us and solve our water worries forever.

One of them pulled out his divining rods, showed us videos of him dancing shirtless and speaking the local lingo with some villagers in rural Angola, and then pointed at the place where our current borehole is and said the rocks and the quartz proved this was a good place to find water.

I wasn’t terribly impressed by his divining intervention that we could find water where we knew there was already water, but hey.

The next guy went heavy on the “everyone else is rubbish” routine, promising only he could deliver with his fantastic drilling rig and without a divining rod in sight.

The risky nature of this business is that most diggers will charge thousands of euros for cutting scores of metres through granite and schist with diamond-tipped drills...whether they find water or not.

The stakes are high and so everyone who has picked their lucky charm and struck a fountain loves their guy and recommends their guy.

It’s a bit like the tip for buying a second hand car from some bloke off Facebook: you’re buying the person rather than the vehicle (RIP Millicent the Land Rover Freelander).

Our friends found so much water thanks to no-shirt-Angola-divining-rod-guy that they don’t know what to do with it all.

And on that basis we asked him to apply for a borehole license and do the digging for us.

Many weeks later the license was issued and exactly as the first section of his drilling rig was being delivered, serendipity (or possibly zemblanity) stepped in and took the form of an old-school local water expert who’d come to advise our neighbour.

On hearing the name of our chosen digger he shook his head and held his face in his hands: “not him” he said, before rattling off a series of examples of how he had not only failed to find water but had ripped off foreigners in the process.

Panic set in: we had paid a deposit, the drill engine had already arrived...but were we going to be ripped off? Would we pay for nothing?

The local expert told us about a brand new technique which used electromagnetic waves to conclusively find water and urged us to think very carefully about our decision – for only €1,300 plus VAT we could remove the risk and beat the dealer.

Oh, we thought, now we’re talking.

In a second surge of serendipity another neighbour had just struck water courtesy of a man whose body ached when he walked over streams, and had a guaranteed “I’ll find water” arrangement.

We put no-shirt guy on hold in the interest of more research, he promised to refund most of the deposit and so we invited electromagnetic “Sensor Man” over.

After years of being a foreign correspondent I approach many things with a healthy dose of scepticism – especially after coming across cases in Iraq of detectors not doing what was promised.

Enter the man with a good story and an interesting piece of kit which apparently can identify the absolutely best place to dig for water.

Just as a bit of background, it is extremely difficult to predict exactly where or how much water is contained in an underground aquifer.

I looked into this in some detail while living and working for the BBC in California and covering the story of a four-year drought and how thirsty almond trees were driving farmers to dig even deeper – it took me to NASA for a satellite solution.

It’s worth watching if only for the video footage of almond trees being harvested.

Since that was made it seems the tech is holding up and is providing great data about the content of surface water, root water and deep groundwater.

Anyway, back to Sensor Man who introduced me to the GER Detect River G system.

I didn’t understand his explanation about how it worked, but that could have been lost in translation...but when I Googled it, the company also claims to magically find gold and diamonds.

Wow. We could strike water and precious metal...and they have developed a carbon detector that can distinguish which carbon it can find...amazing...I must tell NASA.

Check them out and see what you think. The video is quite special, and where I don’t want to influence your judgement, I personally never trust a badly edited man behind a desk who doesn’t fasten his top button.

I drafted in scientist and ionizing radiation expert Niels, to help with the research on this one and his first response was: “if somebody writes in huge letters 'Sensor' on a device I immediately suspect fraud...until proven otherwise.”

After some of his own digging, he went on: “They're trying to mimic a ground radar device but are very particular in not explaining the working principle.

“They mention 'ionic radiation' – well, there’s no such thing of course but there is the very similar sounding 'ionizing radiation' which is my field of specialty, and let me tell you, that is something so completely different.”

And as Sibylle added the observation that it’s a German company which doesn’t have a German language website and is registered in India.

You can find them on Amazon too, but the reviews are not favourable.

So let’s just say that one isn’t going to work for us.

At the moment we’re more focussed on getting our deposit back and waiting for shaking body man to rock up and give us another quote...but he’s got a broke digger.